THE U.S. OF A. ALSO FED THE CROCODILE...

Jonathan Gurwitz: Rumsfeld's history of Iraq omits some key players

"You don't have to be a fan of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to appreciate historical analogies.
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Rumsfeld's recent speech to the American Legion's national convention in Salt Lake City, however, pushed the penchant for historical allusion to a new level. After World War I, Rumsfeld noted, "a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of then-recent memory ... could be avoided."

By the 1930s, cynicism and moral confusion had transformed the desire for accommodation into a fatal retreat to appeasement. He invoked Winston Churchill's observation about those who feed the crocodile in the hope that it will eat them last.

And to make sure no one missed the point, Rumsfeld said that today, "we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism."
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About that older version of Middle Eastern fascism, Rumsfeld knows a thing or two, especially in relation to appeasement. In 1983, he became Ronald Reagan's special envoy for the Middle East. Before the end of the year, Rumsfeld made his first official visit to Baghdad.
It was the continuation of a process begun during the Carter administration to normalize diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq.

The desire to flip a Soviet client state and bolster a nation at war with the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran allowed American policy-makers to rationalize an accommodation with Saddam. But cynicism and moral confusion transformed an understandable geopolitical desire to seek accommodation into full-fledged appeasement.

Saddam's recently concluded trial for crimes against humanity involved events that happened in and around the Iraqi town of Dujail. Witnesses recounted days of torture, summary executions and a meat grinder for human flesh that claimed the lives of 148 Shiite Muslims in 1982.

The mass grave in Dujail was, therefore, still fairly fresh when Rumsfeld shook Saddam's hand. American military and intelligence support for the Baathist regime increased. And in a historical foreshadowing of the oil-for-food scandal, Saddam pocketed billions of dollars of American commodity credits as he waged his Anfal campaign against the Kurds — the subject of his second trial — in which he employed chemical weapons.

None of this detracts from the accuracy of what Rumsfeld said in Salt Lake City. About the ability of free societies to persevere in a long struggle, he said it was important that there not be "any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong."
Just so.

And precisely why Rumsfeld must acknowledge his turn at feeding the crocodile.
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Part of the credibility problem of the Bush administration's effort to stress the historical significance of the war in Iraq is that at least two of its principals were key figures in the accommodation of a previous incarnation of fascism — Rumsfeld in the 1980s, Vice President Dick Cheney in 1991 when he advocated American restraint as Saddam crushed a Shiite uprising the United States had encouraged.

The Shiites and Kurds, of course, have far better and more bitter memories of that history than Americans."




It is not easy learning about your own nation turning its head away from mass murder and/or crimes against humanity but this must become known and excuses should not be made...


Pertinent Links:

1) Jonathan Gurwitz: Rumsfeld's history of Iraq omits some key players